His eyes roved the room with an eager glare. “Weapons! I need weapons!”
Zita sprang to a leather couch and swung a huge oil painting outward from the wall. Behind the painting was a built-in metal cupboard that harbored a veritable miniature arsenal. Lacy grabbed a pair of .45s and shoved one to the girl. On a shelf below the rack were cartridges, boxes of fifty. With his free hand Lacy began stuffing them into his pockets. Swiftly he extracted the magazines from the remaining pistols.
“Spares,” he explained briefly. “Know how to load ’em?”
Zita nodded.
His eyes shifted to another rack. “What are these devilish little toys/bombs?”
He picked up one. It was a four inch metal cylinder about twice the diameter of a broom-handle, with a screw cap at one end.
She snatched it hastily from him and replaced it in the rack.
“Don’t touch those, for God’s sake! They’re incendiary time bombs.”
The major picked one up, glanced at it for a second, and dropped it in his pocket.
Zita ran toward a door and opened it. Lacy followed her into a small connecting room, a bedroom. In one corner the wall projected to make space for a deep clothes closet. The closet door was wide open. The major saw shelves piled with hat boxes and below them, wedged tightly together, was a profusion of dresses and coats on hangers.
To the major’s amazement Zita stepped into the closet, turned her back to the crowded array of garments and beckoned to him.
“Why hide in a closet?” he said dryly. “I thought we had some faint notion of taking to the roof.”
“This is the elevator,” Zita explained with a wan smile.
“By gad, it is!” Lacy growled incredulously.
He took one look at the metal panel with its vertical array of numbered buttons set flush into the plastered wall. The lean-faced chief of Amusement, Inc. narrowed his eyes and smiled grimly. The girl closed the closet door and an inner barrier slid across and locked. Zita pressed the top button in the wall-plaque. The button was marked: GARDEN. The innocent looking ‘clothes closet’ began to ascend smoothly in its shaft with a faint hum of automatic machinery.
“Quite a clever bit of camouflage,” the major chuckled mildly.
He was trying to keep the whole ghastly affair on a jovial basis. The girl’s courage, he saw, was close to the breaking point. If she collapsed into hysteria or fainted Lacy would be in an even uglier mess than he was right now. His only chance was to follow her lead, to make a last stand on the roof of the house behind his loaded .45s.
The ascending elevator stopped with a jerk and the door slid open.
Sunlight fell on the major’s face. His lungs expanded with the tang of cool fresh air. He found himself in a square open summer house, flooded with sunlight on all four sides. Plants and thick climbing vines covered the low wooden sills.
The beauty of the roof itself made the major gasp with astonishment. It was a landscaped garden dotted with flower beds and shrubbery. Stone paths radiated from a shallow basin of water in the center that was surmounted by the weathered statue of a nude sea-nymph pouring water from a fluted conch-shell.
Lacy had no way of judging how high above the ground he was. He judged not more than five or six stories, because he could see the towering brick wall of an apartment house rising a block away like a many-windowed cliff, high above the level of the garden roof.
“What’s that queer smell?” Zita cried suddenly.
Smoke! He sniffed the sharp acrid reek of burning wood.
Zita’s sudden scream roused the major from his savage contemplation. He saw slinking figures emerging into view from the twin summer house on the opposite side of the roof beyond the circular stone pool. Instantly he fired and dropped one of his enemies sprawling into a flower bed. The rest of them scattered like hares, diving into shrubbery, crawling out of sight behind the clipped boxwood hedges that lined the paths.
Lacy dodged back and crouched warily beside the girl, his gun muzzle steady on the wooden sill. He saw a face peer from behind a garden urn and his finger squeezed the trigger for a cool shot that sent stone fragments flying.
His face turned for an instant toward the crouching Zita.
“How did those rats get up here so promptly? Is there another entrance to the roof?”
“Through the Master’s elevator,” Zita rejoined faintly. “The elevator from his private chamber leads to the other summer house.”
“Down!” Lacy yelled suddenly.
From behind a clump of dwarfed bushes rose a small black spheroid. It curved through the air and burst with an odd plopping sound. Instantly a gray vapor spurted like a thick cloud. Tear gas! Luckily for Lacy the rogue who had hurled the bomb aimed poorly. He had tossed it from a cramped prone position and it rose almost vertically in the air and fell well toward the center of the roof.
The wind thinned the gas into long ragged streamers and blew it puffily back toward the raiders. As it was, Lacy’s eyes were red and smarting. Slow tears began to roll down his cheeks.
He grinned haggardly at the girl. Like him she was weeping, rubbing at inflamed eyes.
“Buck up,” he encouraged. “Those birds won’t try that again, I fancy. It punishes them more than it does us.”
He saw Zita cower and fall flat on her face. He thought it was fear, but in another second he was undeceived. Green wood-splinters flew as a bullet ripped the summer house sill, barely an inch from his body. He saw the jagged hole that had made Zita cower to the floor. There had been no warning reports. A fresh arrival among the desperate thugs was pumping lead at them from a rifle equipped with a silencer.
From that instant Tattersall Lacy became a fiercely fighting automaton.
A haze of smoke shrouded the roof. He could see flitting figures intermittently; and whenever he did the big .45s in either hand jerked and pounded with a smashing recoil.
A confused numbness spread through his brain and rolled back the years. He was back in France in the flame-gutted courtyard of the Duberny Farm. The shrub-covered summer house and the crouched figure of Zita completed the illusion. She kept monotonously reloading his magazines, passing them to his groping hand. Like that weeping peasant girl of the Duberny Farm, Zita was fighting to the last ditch in her own violated home.
Without shifting his eyes from the enemy he kept patting Zita’s bent head with a fumbling left hand, growling at her with harsh, monotonous encouragement:
“Carry on, ma cherie! Chin up!”
His brain steadied. Out of the swirling haze he saw a figure rising, armed and snarling. It seemed to materialize like a ghost. A staring face loomed scarcely a dozen feet away.
Lacy’s gun whipped level. He recognized the haggard unmasked features of the Scarlet Ace. It was the same ghoulish face he had seen unmasked only once before—on the banks of the swirling Hudson river when the Ace had dived into the dark flowing current to escape the deadly gunfire of Amusement, Inc.
Flame spat from the weapons of the Master criminal. Bullets zipped and whined through the summer house. In his mad hate the Ace was firing wildly. Lacy forced himself to sight slowly and carefully at the heart of the onrushing Master. His finger squeezed the trigger.
But before Lacy’s .45 could roar, a violent blow on the major’s forearm deflected the muzzle. His bullet missed the maddened criminal and smashed a stone urn to flying fragments. The Scarlet Ace whirled instantly with a shrill yelp and vanished into the gray smoke haze with long stumbling strides.
Zita’s lovely eyes were wide and glaring. Her hand caught again at Lacy’s wrist and they struggled insanely for a moment for possession of the weapon.
“Let him go!” she shrieked. “Don’t kill him!”
The major’s poised fist had swung upward to strike the screaming woman away from him. Slowly his fist relaxed. He unbent the fingers from his wris
t with a gentle and steady insistence.
She covered her face with both hands and harsh sobs racked her body. A dull paralysis of despair rooted Lacy’s feet, made his body sag with weariness.
He felt himself meshed in a horrible nightmare.
Here and there he could see shadowy figures rising, running forward warily, dropping flat behind bushes and shrubs. He emptied his gun at his flitting enemies with a vicious despair. He saw a man topple headlong; another spun wildly, clutching at his pierced throat.
Lacy felt the butt of a fresh pistol thrust against his groping left palm. He dropped the empty weapon and fired again grimly, watching his shots.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Zita, crouched on her knees, swiftly reloading the gun he had just dropped. Their eyes clashed and she nodded her head with a wan smile. He knew what she meant. There was to be fierce warfare between them as far as the Ace was concerned. But somehow, he knew—now that the Ace had escaped—that Zita would remain, crouched loyally at his side, methodically reloading clips till death should silence them both forever. She was his ally, his loyal comrade in arms.
He lost track of time. He was like an automaton. He saw their small supply of cartridges dwindle and disappear as Zita rammed them into magazines and shoved him the hot guns. Presently her open palms gestured briefly. Finished! No more! All that was left was a scattering of empty cartridge cases and the glittering dirk that Lacy had pried from the dead fingers of the deaf-mute.
Suddenly Zita screamed. A gangster came plunging forward, a yelling figure with thick legs and the wide brawny shoulders of an ox. The major’s muzzle swung to the centre of the powerful chest and he squeezed his trigger. The trigger didn’t move. He glared at the gun. The slide was all the way back. Empty!
Lacy had barely time to drop to one knee and scoop up the glittering knife when the impact of his enemy’s body hurled him headlong. The next instant he was lifted in the air and crushed in a terrific embrace. His eyes popped with agony and he felt the breath squeezing out of his compressed lungs. He was aware, dimly, of Zita pounding futilely with her fists at the body of his foe.
His left hand was bent crookedly behind his own back yet he still retained the knife. He squirmed desperately while a heavy fist pounded blows at his head. The point of his own knife blade slashed him as he jerked it past his own ribs. Like a flash he lifted it high and thrust downward with the last vicious atom of his waning strength.
The knife sank up to the hilt in the bent back of his foe. Both men fell together with a crash. The encircling arms released their tight pressure. Lacy rolled over on his face and rebounded to his feet like a cat.
To his amazement no fusillade of bullets came to mow him down. His dimmed eyes saw vaguely a wild jamboree of furiously fighting men. He heard a staccato, shattering sound that made his brain reel with a wave of dazed unbelief—the sharp, never to be forgotten whiplash reports of Springfield rifles. His head buzzed. That harsh crackling echo of disciplined firing made him recall like a crazy phantasy the flitting figures of sweat-streaked Yank infantrymen shoving ahead like buzzing hornets through the tangled and bloody coverts of Belleau Wood.
He took a stumbling step forward, peering through red-rimmed half blinded eyes.
Straight at him came the ugly sheen of a pair of outthrust bayonets. He shrank back, trying vainly to shout.
The bayonets swerved away suddenly. Up went the two Springfields to a rigid rifle salute. Tattersall Lacy was staring with incredulous eyes at the brown shirts and grey snap-brim hats of two ex-marine hellions from Amusement, Inc.
A wizened little man with a big .45 in his fist came racing up, yelping like a terrier:
“Jack! Thank God! Are you all right?”
Charlie Weaver stared curiously at the girl, Zita. The soldiers stared, too.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOLD OF THE MASTER
Tattersall Lacy’s body stiffened. He seemed to change visibly. Without a spoken word he became instantly the leader of the field forces of Amusement, Inc.—a leader with a cold and disconcerting eye.
He said very softly: “May I ask, Captain Weaver, how you were fortunate enough to know that I was here?”
“I—er—followed you, sir, to the art gallery and—”
“You disobeyed orders. Is that what you mean?”
Weaver’s glance wavered. “I’m afraid I did, sir.”
“I see.” A cold murmur. No inflection in it whatever. “Very well, Captain. Recall your men and let’s get out of here quickly.”
He turned toward the bullet riddled summer house behind him. Weaver spoke again, nervously.
“You’ll have to use the other shaft, sir. This one’s been damaged below by a grenade.”
Weaver darted away and the shrill blast of his whistle sounded.
“May I, my dear?” Lacy murmured mildly and, slipping an arm about Zita’s waist, he led her across the landscaped roof toward the elevator shaft opposite. The roof they crossed was a tangled mess, a bloody shambles. The girl averted her eyes and shuddered; Lacy watched her narrowly for signs of collapse.
Pat Harrigan appeared, grinning cheerfully and the major snapped a sharp question at him. “Any casualties?”
“Two, sir. Minor wounds. Cantrell and O’Shea. They’re in the bus now. We’ll have to retreat fast, sir, or it’s going to be awkward.”
“Where is the bus?”
Harrigan outlined the situation crisply. The bus was waiting outside the alley that connected with the street in the rear of the building. It would be touch-and-go to get away clean without a brush with the police. The few police on the scene were, for the moment, under control.
Pat grinned slightly. There were, he explained, three marines with a Tommie gun on duty inside the ruined front doorway of the house. They were guarding a trio of disarmed and very angry cops. One was the regular patrolman from the beat; two others had arrived in a hurry in a radio car. All three had dashed into the house and been promptly nabbed. There was a crowd of spectators in the street out in front but nobody was rushing in.
Lacy listened, nodded. He asked only one question.
“Did you kill or capture the Ace?”
“No, sir. He got away from us in that last rush. Slipped off through some damned rat hole we haven’t been able to discover. We’ve gone over the amazing place pretty thoroughly. Outside of our own men there isn’t a living being left in the house.”
The major’s eyes smoldered. In silence he helped Zita into the elevator and in silence he descended.
The men of Amusement, Inc. were drawn up in double file in a long gloomy corridor in the basement. Sunlight glimmered through the crack of a huge metal door that stood partly ajar.
“All accounted for,” Weaver reported, “except the rear guard.”
“Good. Mr. Corning and Mr. Harrigan will ride with the bus. Sergeant, get the men off at once! Smartly!”
Then: “Order your rear guard to fall back, Mr. Weaver!”
The silver whistle of the chief of staff shrilled.
Presently there came the sound of scraping feet and three marines appeared, backing slowly into view. The soldier in the center held an ugly looking Tommie gun at his shoulder, ready for action.
Trailing the backward moving trio at a respectful distance came three empty-handed and weaponless cops with narrowed, hostile eyes and rage written glaringly all over their florid faces. As they stood stiffly at bay Lacy chuckled softly and took the loaded pistol from Weaver’s hand.
“Rear guard, fall back at once to the transport!” He trumpeted. “Charles, will you favor me by escorting the lady to the—er—staff car?”
The nearest of the helpless policemen growled and took a hesitant forward step. He halted at the menace in Lacy’s gray eyes. The big .45 in the major’s grip was rocklike in its steadiness.
“Attention, my ch
arming uniformed friends,” Lacy purred. “Please give ear to a short, true statement. I have no intention whatever of being stopped or interfered with by you gentlemen or by anyone else. I don’t intend to shoot unless I have to. The man who forces me to shoot will be killed. Do you take my meaning?”
There was a sudden flashing report from his pistol and the blue cap of the nearest patrolman spun from his head and fell to the floor.
“Remember,” Lacy said softly. “The first fool who sticks his face out that door will have his misguided nose blown through the back of his head.”
He wriggled sideways with a lithe movement. The heavy door slammed. Down a paved courtyard Lacy sped and through a gap in a board fence. Beyond was a long alley hemmed in on both sides by sheer brick walls. He sprinted along its echoing length, up a flight of worn stone steps.
The staff car of Amusement, Inc. was waiting at the curb. It was a harmless looking and slightly battered taxi, giving no hint of the armored sides and bullet-proof glass with which it was equipped.
Lacy took a quick look around. The bus had already disappeared. He crossed the sidewalk in three strides and leaped into the taxi. It shot away instantly.
The major dropped wearily into the empty seat next to Zita. Her eyes were dry and staring; she was shaking incessantly with a tremulous hysteria. Lacy talked to her as though she were a child. His voice was low and persuasive, his hand patted her clenched fingers with a magnetic and steady reassurance. Weaver kept his blank eyes studiously toward the front.
“Sergeant! Stop at the next quiet street!”
The cab spun round a corner and drew up at the curb. The major got out and assisted Zita to the sidewalk.
“Be off with you!” he snapped to Dillon. “Find me another taxicab in a hurry!”
Three minutes later a taxi rolled up with the stolid Dillon on the running-board. He hopped off, snapped the faintest ghost of a salute and walked back to the waiting staff car.
The hackman glanced curiously at the pair who seemed to be changing mysteriously from one cab to another. He threw open his door.
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